So basically, when I woke up this morning and switched on my computer, I was greeted with an ominous dark screen bearing the message "BOOTMGR is missing, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Many hours of finangaling later, I'm pretty sure my hard drive just straight up died in my sleep, so I've installed Windows on a backup drive. However! My Sims game was installed on a separate SDD. Not just the My Documents folder, the entire game too. But just double-clicking on the Sims2EP9 exe doesn't work because that would just be too easy. I suspect I'm going to have to reinstall, but I don't want to do that because then I have to patch all the EPs (I have the disks) and make sure I grab everything out of Bins and I think there's some Scriptorium stuff I need to grab as well and ugh, I just don't want to when it's all right there installed already.

So before I do that, is there any way I can... not do that? Some sort of registry tinkering or whatnot? I already have to reinstall everything that was on the dead drive, I don't want to reinstall stuff that was on a separate working drive if I can possibly avoid it.

Unless you have a backup of the necessary registry keys, you're out of luck. What you could do is to backup your old installation files, then install the game from the discs and replace the new installation files with your old ones so that the patched files, script info and any graphics rules edits are there. But you'd need to install the game the long way to rebuild the registry information.

Bleugh, I thought that might be the case. Right, I shall do that, and then make a backup of the registry for next time, because there will be a next time, this backup drive is tiny and temporary and I see lots more reinstalling in my near future.

ETA: On second thought, is it possible to install the game on the C drive, to avoid any conflicts/mishaps/accidental overwrites, and then redirect things to the game installation that's already on the SSD?